ALTHOUGH
much has been written about Edinburgh Castle, the historical interest
attaching to the ancient fortress is so great that perhaps the
appearance of another book on the part it played in the romantic history
of Scotland is not without justification. This attempt to collect the
strands of history from the web wherein the story of the Castle is woven
was not undertaken with any intention of writing a ‘guide-book. My
desire has been to entertain those who dwell within the shadows of the
grey fortress and to give to others who may visit its ancient
battlements food for the inspiration which from my earliest days I have
received from them.

I
have pleasure in expressing my indebtedness to, among present-day
authorities, Mr. C. G. Cash, F.R.S.G.S., and Mr. John Geddie; also to
the monumental work edited by the late Rev. Dr. Taylor. My thanks are
due to my friend Professor Patrick Geddes, who has kindly furnished the
book with an Introduction, and to Mr. William J. Hay, who read the
proofs with much care.

LOUIS
WEIRTERAugust
1913

INTRODUCTION

IT must be twenty years
and more since Mr. Weirter and I made acquaintance; when he joined the
cheerful company and helped the opening festival of one of those groups
of students, happily mingled with artists, who in hostel after hostel of
Castlehill and Lawnmarket and St. Giles were in those days initiating
for Edinburgh the adoption of that free and informal mode of associated
life from which the historic colleges of mediaeval universities have
been a further but not always a more vital development. And I speak here
first of this little fellowship of University Hall, not only as having
afforded our initial and enduring personal tie, but as having set its
stamp upon us both, since common environment and associated action ever
tend toward unity of interest and harmony of spirit. For our association
of 'town and gown'—of individual citizen and student then, and as yet,
but planned to steep and spread into University and City in no very
distant morrow—was already foreseeing, in this union of artist and
student, the educational future, in which the old schism between
knowledge and beauty, the long separation of learning and art, and of
these from the common life, shall be abated. More than this, it was also
forefeeling an opening civic future, through which our romantic old
town, largely fallen though it has been for generations into squalor and
even ruin, should yet be worthily conserved, maintained, renewed. From
our vantage-points among its highest outlooks we could already foresee
its recovered precedence over the New Town, which with all its
stateliness is, and can be, but the foremost mansion-suburb of the
historic city. To the rightful denizens of this—the innumerable company
of lawyers made perfect, who well-nigh to a man, as fame has so long
made known, and social survey can but confirm, exceed those of all other
cities in scrupulous conformities, in conscious respectabilities, and
all the other formal virtues, and whose dynamic attitude, that of
criticism, is correspondingly practised and displayed—to these, I say,
our dreams have naturally appeared but vain, as indeed they do to this
day, and even to most of those fathers of either City or University who
mistakenly persist in inhabiting that dangerously chilling neighbourhood.
Still, our fraternity has managed to survive j and as little by little
we have cleansed and gardened,, repaired and built, our dreams have
developed* our plans and town-plans with them, until we are well-nigh
ready to leave to our successors in these first hostels of Old Edinburgh
not merely the project, but a clear and organized, albeit plastic and
adaptive, design for the * Historic Mile/ nothing short of the
phoenix-like renewal of the ancient capital as a modern one. With this
too may advance that rejuvenescence of its University, which has long
and at many points been in unmistakable if tardy progress, as henceforth
largely a residential one, yet withal not less democratic than in its
best days, with its modest halls and courts mingled among the homes and
gardens of the people; and it may be, yet more vitally and closely knit
with their own renewing purpose and joy of life than even were the
friaries of old, or are the settlements of to-day.

Thus, even within the
opening generation Old Edinburgh may again be no less significant than
in its bygone days of patriotic defence or of religious initiative, of
political intensity or of philosophic thought. Indeed, why not more than
ever? For what if that rarest of historic marvels, that of a city’s too
rare culture-blossoming and architectural renewal, be after all a simple
and an opening life-secret—that which lies plain before us in the
growing child, the interaction of bodily and mental life, of health and
happiness as sound and sane—material conditions and higher activities
evolving together? Even for the academic town, though Edinburgh, past or
future, is far more, our associated endeavours from the very first have
begun to show how it may readily, even speedily, be made a no
insignificant nor less iniividual third to those two most magnificent of
the material creations of collegiate life in the past, the *Backs’ in
Cambridge, the 'High’ of Oxford. For, unapproachably splendid in their
way though these two monumental perspectives be, here is a yet fuller
civic, national, and historic seat, in the most nobly romantic and
inspiring setting; and this for learning and its professions, and up to
their highest applications and expressions in literature or for art; and
with its innumerable study windows, befitting a city of thought, each
commanding some synthetic yet changeful view and vision of city and
country, mountain and sea and sky, hardly surpassed by that which of old
aided the thought of Athens to its encyclopaedic syntheses, which
stirred it to creative idealisms. Where better can youth recall the long
pageant of the historic past, and thence proceed to grapple with the
tangled tasks of the present, or search into its problems, and finally
plan and strive toward the opening future, than upon this long sky-line
which runs from the Abbey ruins and the Palace towers up to the yet more
varied and historic Castle, and which thus sums up against the sky the
past, the present, and something of the opening future; and all this
scarce less dramatically and far more comprehensively than in any other
great city^view in the world? For in the high outlooks of the classic
cities so full a presentment of recent and present times is lacking,
while from the towering heights of new^world centres we miss the rich
perspective of the past. Here, moreover, the presentment is complete and
emphatic enough to be more than a local record; and to be broadly
representative, and to a scarcely less striking degree, of the main
institutions and monuments of the long history of civilization. It is no
less than this social and civic completeness which gives the central
panorama of Edinburgh its impressiveness to every eye. Scott's work was
indeed above all an evidence of this and an earnest of more: and thus,
when that tragic pre-eminence in the diseases of overcrowding amid which
the University has so justly won and ever and again renews her medical
fame has been cleansed away for good, and her most crowded school thus
falls to mere provincial magnitude, she may bestir herself to the
shaping of a new Faculty of Civics, with a School of Sociology perhaps
no less pre-eminent in its turn. Here then, and indeed more fully stated
than either of us has realized before, are the deep ties which after so
many years have brought our artist^author and his preface writer
together—fitly at first as players in one of the masques with which we
have been celebrating the semi-jubilee of our pro*collegiate and civic
endeavour ; and now, fitly again, between these bookish beards, as
lovers of Old Edinburgh, and each therefore in his own way intimate with
its initial, central, culminating feature, the rock-built Castle.

Edinburgh, though
fruitful in young ability and aspiration and rich in educative resource
and influence, has ever been one of the sternest mothers; chary of
claiming, even accepting, her children’s aid, but sending them forth
throughout the world to seek what fortune may send. Yet few can forget
her charm, and many at one phase or another of life “return with a
natural and salmon like affection to the place of their rearing. And
these feel more than before the simple pride and pleasure of their youth
in her antique stones, since now their very dust is felt to lie deep
with memories dear. Here then is an essential cause of this book, and
the spirit of its drawings and its tales together. To set forth the old,
heroic Heritage of the past, to recognize mingled with this the sombre
Burden, is an ever-renewing task of the arts : the harper and saga-man
of old, the minstrel and the ballad-singer, the romancer and historian,
and now the etcher and writer of today are in one true and continuous
succession. It may seem long since Sir Walter first adequately revealed
Edinburgh and its region to Scotland and the world; and since then,
after the memorable generation he kindled again to Cavalier and to
Puritan idealisms, we have had that long reaction into a coalition of
the defects of both, from which we are again seeking escape. Till two
generations ago and less the name of Scot has stood throughout the world
with and for the noblest—witness, at simplest, the proverbial phrases
of France not only Fiev comme ten Ecossais, or even Hospitalier comme
vcn Ecossais, but also, and this through history most truly of all,
Genereux comme un. Ecossais for who have ever held friendship and honour
more high, and life more lightly? But to-day, wherever English is
spoken, have not the commonest associations of 'Scotch' come to be but
with drink and with bawbees? Nor are these undeserved; these vile
thirsts and obsessions in which we thus are acclaimed by our imitators
to xiv excel are at once the essence and the nemesis of the coalition
aforesaid, that of old mysticisms decayed with ambitions degraded. And
our city would not be that well-nigh perfect expression of Scottish and
of general history and civilization as which we have claimed it d!d it
not to-day stamp itself upon every eye by its long lines of
public-houses and slums, by the perhaps yet more ominously towering
first-class hotels which confront them, and above all by a bank and an
advertisement office upon the fullest level of magnificence, in fact the
only two nobly situated buildings of our time upon which wealth has been
poured out like water. But now again the times are changing, and we with
them. The generation which will be remembered in history as most
identified with the material growth of towns, but these debased with
dull prosperity and drugged into squalid sleep, is now lapsing from its
ill-used power, and a new age of Cities is beginning. Is this not plain
to the reader? Not yet plain in Edinburgh or in London it may be
confessed, though indications are not lacking; yet here, where I am
writing, it is plain to every citizen, and even manifesting itself
before every child. For this old city of Ghent is on fete—a city to many
seeming now merely provincial, and of course a long way outside
Brussels, yet none the less the most historic and monumental of all the
regional capitals of the longest civilized and most civilizing region of
Northern Europe, this great delta of the Netherlands, of which the 'Great Powers' are still in too many ways but the lagging hinterlands or
the outlying isles.

This main fete of Ghent
is a world-exhibition, and that in many ways of the best; above all to
be remembered beyond its material wonders, as of radiology, aviation and
the rest, for having given the clearest expression in the world as yet
of a conception long and slowly struggling toward utterance at many
points in England and America alike, and not least in Edinburgh—and now
soon to be familiar throughout the world as a new objective for thought,
a new goal for policy—that of the Revival of Cities. For here in one
palace, worthily metropolitan, are shown forth the civic services of
Paris, after seeing which the purest of political fools will not so
readily again sneer Gas and Sewage. Then near this a noble 'Square
Communal is formed by the palaces of the four greatest cities of the
land, Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels, Liege. The nearest doorway to this
square is that of the most varied and many-sided of Civic and Town
Planning Exhibitions as yet brought together ; and beside it has just
met the 'First International Congress of Cities' with representation
from a hundred and more all the way from Aberdeen to Bucharest, at which
the burger master and councillor and engineer have sat in unwonted
converse with the historian, the idealist, and the artist. Almost as I
write an hour-long tercentenary pageant has marched and ridden by, to
the unveiling of a great monument to the city’s worthies of yet earlier
centuries, the brothers Van Eyck; and from this the young King has gone
on to open the garden fetes, and to encourage the new agricultural
village.

And so on: the Revivance
of Cities is in actual progress; and here, if any still doubt, we have a
kilometre and more of plan-covered walls to confirm it; though of course
how long our Rip Van Winkles may snore, or, if awakened, feel puzzled or
determinedly incredulous, is a quite different matter.

Enough, however, of Ghent
for the present; it is time to come home to Edinburgh, where with all
its beauty the seasons are late and it is chilly in the morning.

Pending the approaching
Revivance of Edinburgh, what better task than to be thus recording its
central monument and heritage with Mr. Weirter, to be interpreting its
broadest aspects with Dr. Schlapp, to be redesigning its pageant of
memories, as Mr. Orr in his turn is doing ? In such ways artists,
writers, and readers have come together before now; and, when the time
is but a little more ripe, we too may join hands in the coming Masque of
Arousal.

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